paloma's journal

i succeeded in my plan from yesterday of getting extra sleep and i had much more energy today. i also didn't have to leave for work as early as usual so i had time to put another coat on the tabletop. it just needs to cure for a while, and then i can sand it and coat the bottom...

it was really hot out, but luckily i was working most of the day inside. one of the things i worked on was learning rhinoceros, the 3d modeling / CAD app. it actually ended up being pretty intuitive and pleasant to draw and model in, and it seems like a very powerful app, so i was excited to learn something that seems like it will be useful in the future.

i dropped my car off at the shop on the way home so they can look at it tomorrow. it was making that odd noise on and off; i don't think it's anything serious but i wanted to do my due diligence before driving to visit my family.

my bike lock anchor arrived, so i installed it by bolting it to the cinder block wall in our garage. we are quite pleased to have one less bike taking up space in our hallway.

then i took a semi-nap in the hammock.

it's finally cooling off a little, and it looks like it might thunderstorm. looking forward to a chill evening, maybe we will watch a movie...

this morning i woke up and my body told me that i didn't get enough sleep, so tried to take it easy today. after work, i skipped my yoga shift/class (after confirming that the other volunteer would be there.)

the people i work for might be getting a puppy soon. i hope they do so i can vicariously enjoy it.

i made a little workstation in my basement and started coating the tabletop with polyurethane. i also planted a little shrub in the backyard — it's called blackhaw viburnum. i made a little rock garden around it to hopefully make it apparent that no one should mow or weed wack it down.

also, i saw the skunk moseying around outside. it was very cute.

hope i can get some extra sleep tonight!

today was rather wet and rainy. at work, i mostly worked on the computer. i figured out how to do some neat scripting in photoshop for batch processing files that will save a bunch of time. then we cleaned up the wood shop and david helped me cut down my giant sheet of baltic birch plywood for the kitchen sideboard. it came out looking very nice. on my way home, i picked up some wood finish and screws. but i will probably have to wait until it's not raining to coat the wood outside since the finish is smelly.

when i got home, we had a meeting with our friend tim about the future plans for polyphase portal. then i called my mom to wish her a happy birthday.

i have a lot of ideas right now about setting up a small wood shop in my basement. maybe too many ideas for my own good, as there are other things going on that i also need to attend to. between working during the week and traveling on the weekends, it can be difficult to balance everything. i'm going to visit my family this weekend, but after that i want to stay put for a while.

it's fun to have projects going on, but it's also important to give myself a chance to rest and go into parasympathetic mode. it will be a busy week, but i can still find little moments to chill out and remind my brain that i don't need to keep going nonstop.

i had the day off, so i mostly worked on various projects in a scattered manner. i have continued to ruminate on some woodworking/furniture ideas for things to improve around the house. three things i want to make soon, in order, are:

• the larger tabletop for our kitchen sideboard
• an angled speaker stand to point a speaker downward that's at the top of a shelf
• the coffee table / cabinet that hides a retractable tv

i found out that the makerspace sells sheets of high quality baltic birch plywood, so i went over there during andrei's shift and they helped me load a 3/4 inch sheet onto the roof of my station wagon. turns out that a full sheet of hardwood ply is actually quite heavy; i had planned to rip it myself on the sawstop at work tomorrow, but i might need some help handling it. i hope that the people i work for don't mind too much (they seem pretty supportive of me doing my own woodworking projects.)

other than that, i worked on a small coding project for andrei's business, watered the plants, made some designs in sketchup for the woodworking projects, and other miscellaneous things. now to try to get my sleep schedule back on track for my work week...

woke up a bit late, and started the day slowly. hung out a bit more with brenna, we made some music and tidied up from our cooking and craft projects.

on the way back home, i stopped by LSD, the venue we played at last week, to pick up some items we left there by accident. i got there via subway and citibike, then rode the citibike north over the pulaski bridge and caught the 7 to grand central.

on the metro north train, i came up with some design ideas for expanding our kitchen counter tabletop and building a new coffee table with a hidden tv that can lift up from inside with a motor. not sure when or if i will end up making it, but it would be a nice way to have our living room feel more open when we are not watching movies.

i got home and andrei had made a very delicious soup. then we watched a ridiculous korean sci-fi movie. and then it was now.

a rainy day hanging out with brenna and eitan in brooklyn. motivation to go out and about in the wet weather was quite low. we spent most of the day cooking, baking, and making cute tiny figurines and props out of modeling clay (brenna enjoys arts and crafts so i brought some clay along).

today was a bit nicer out — warm and summery but not too hot. i had to go to the dmv to get my car registration and driver's license transferred to connecticut. once i got that done, i hopped on the metro north train to nyc and met up with my friend brigid, who was at a show at prospect park.

the show had started earlier in the afternoon, so i missed the first two acts, but i caught the third one and it was quite good. it ventured into breakcore/digital hardcore territory. i'm not sure of the performer's name.

it was still light out when i made it there, and the situation of this show was amusing to discover as i walked around on the paths in prospect park. i knew the general area that it was supposed to be in, and once i got there, it was a matter of following the strange sounds which i assumed correctly would lead me to the show. when i stepped into a clearing in the trees, i saw a large grassy area with a cement oval where the performer was seated between two large speakers. in the surrounding grass, people were scattered hanging out, some dancing and some wearing strange costumes and some doing both. there was also a dog running around between everybody. it was a very festive, carnival-esque vibe.

it turned out that some of the people wearing the costumes were part of the final act, which was a four-person noise performance combined with a very abstract play, or perhaps an avant-garde dance piece. they used various costumes and props, including metal pots filled with burning wood, spray foam sculptures made to look like bones, a large puppet that was operated by all the performers at once, and several buckets of slime. that act continued until it got dark, and then brigid and i wandered off in search of bahn mi sandwiches.

now i'm in the basement of brigid's current house-sitting spot, getting ready to crash out on the couch.

another day of shed projects and other miscellaneous woodworking. after my work day ended, i stopped by the community center, but didn't use the gym. i just went in the sauna and took a shower. i was covered in dirt from working outside in the morning, but also the showers there are really nice.

then andrei and i went to weird music night, which is a monthly event at an art space here in new haven, and hosts many eclectic performances. this particular instance started off strong with a really good modular set by someone named kyle grimm, which meandered into IDM territory (i wish i couple upload a video here, but that is a project for another time). then our friend john who organizes the event played with his noise project, skulltower 5E, which mostly involved guitar feedback, strange masks, and that toy instrument you blow into that has a piano keyboard on it. there were a couple more acts as well, but each performance was in a different room so they were able to transition quickly between them, and each space had its own atmosphere with lighting and the art installations that happened to be up at the time.

i don't have work until next week so we got indian food and stayed up late watching a movie. it was quite a full day!

today, on my way to work, i saw the biggest snapping turtle i have ever seen in my life. it was midway through crossing the road as i passed. luckily it was large enough to be noticeable from a distance, so everyone was stopping and waiting for it to finish. it looked like it was about two feet long and probably weighed as much as a medium to large dog!

we continued working on the framing of the shed — i am putting a photo of the progress below. today we added the roof rafters.

after work, i headed to the yoga studio, to work the front desk and then join a class. the yoga felt great. after that, i tried to catch the tail end of a music performance at the library, but it was already over when i got there, so i just went home. andrei made an excellent dinner with lots of veggies and then we watched a nature show.

also, i had a dream last night that i and whoever i was living with in this fictional scenario had allowed 3-5 feral cats to move into our house. they were kind of cute but also kind of dirty. i did not want to touch any of them. they caused chaos and it was entertaining at times and annoying at times. in my dream i was mentally designing a little duplex "cat apartment building" (a series of small, padded cubes) for them to hang out in, and planning how i would build it.

i am allergic to cats, so i would never consider adopting one in real life, but i've dreamed about it multiple times.

it's late and i'm tired, but i want to keep up this journaling habit, so i will write briefly...

today was rainy, so we couldn't make too much progress on the shed. but i worked on the parts i could do indoors. i started off the day cutting "birds mouth" cuts into the roof joists with a jigsaw. i had to do basically the same cut 16 times, and when i did the last ones, they came out perfect. you could not tell they were cut with a handheld saw at all!

later on, it stopped raining, so i spent a little bit of the end of the day screwing the floor joists in. my knees got covered in mud; i probably shouldn't have worked outside at all but i was oddly determined.

on my way home, i stopped by the gym for the first time to try it out. i didn't want to overdo it, because i was doing physical work all day and i have yoga class tomorrow, but i tried out some of the various machines. i like the place; the facilities are nice and i like that they don't play any music or television out loud. (the muzak that my old gym in manhattan played in the locker room actually caused me to rage quit my membership.)

i self diagnosed my foot pain as plantar fasciitis. i talked to my mom on the phone and she said that she and my dad have both have had it too at times, and she gave me some tips.

andrei was visiting their sister, and came back with groceries. i made some food for my next two lunches. udon noodles, tofu, and veggies with szechuan style sauce. it came out pretty good.

andrei also did all of our laundry at nora's house, so my new thrift store purchases have entered circulation in my wardrobe. i am very pleased with my haul!

well, this ended up not being very brief after all. anyways, it's bedtime.

at work today, we continued working on the shed. most of the day was occupied by identifying and cutting recycled wood for the rafters.

on my way back home, i stopped by a community center i've been meaning to check out. they have a gym, pool, and saunas, so i thought it would be a good place to exercise and relax after work, since i pass right by it anyway. i signed up for a monthly membership.

we got a really sweet care package in the mail from a friend. i will need to find some things to send over to them :)

before bedtime, i finished setting up cross-posting to mastodon from this journal. so now i have the option to automatically post the link to my journal entry when i publish or edit it!

(i will probably only do this for specific journal entries that i want to share... most of my entries here are just notes for myself. not private, but not necessarily the most exciting to others.)

p.s. i shouldn't work on things like this right before bed, it's like an invitation to lose track of time.

today i did a float tank for the first time. i have been interested in trying it for a long time, and someone who works at my yoga studio also works at a float place nearby, and she gave me a voucher for a free session. i liked it! the water has lots of epsom salts (magnesium) in it, so it makes you very buoyant, and the float chamber is also insulated from any outside sound or light. i was in there for 90 minutes, and when i came back out, it felt like all of my senses were amplified.

other things i did today:

• published a blog post about friday's show, including a full recording of our set
• i made a logotype of our band name for the header of that blog post, and it came out cool, so i ordered some stickers of it
• did a little coding to fix opengraph (social preview) images on my blog and this journal

last night we watched a movie called the usual suspects.

it's getting late, but i still need to do a bit of cooking to prep some lunches for the week. then hopefully, if there's time, we can watch an episode of a vintage david attenborough nature show.

the show went super well last night! it was at a diy space in greenpoint, on the top floor of an industrial building. the people who ran the space were nice and gave us tamales. also the people organizing and working the show were friends and fellow artists and nice people. a bunch of our friends came and there was plenty of time to hang out and chat on the roof while we waited for the sun to go down enough for the projections to look good.

our set went pretty well, though andrei said they had a technical hiccup, i don't think anyone could tell. i used my same setup with my modular video synth, resolume, and custom mapped controllers that i have used for the past few shows i've done, but it's quite a versatile system so i found some fun new things i could do with it. our friend jonathan kindly managed our camera during the set so that we could get a full length video of the set, though it doesn't really do justice to the actual thing.

i watched MSHR's set while laying down on one of the pads right up front by the projection screen, which was excellent. i often wish i could watch performances while lying down, but usually the venue does not provide that option. needless to say, their performance was amazing. they had a series of short vignettes where each one had a 3D scene and an audio patch with linked parameters, so the video and sound would change together. they were using blender to render real-time visuals, which i didn't even know was possible (apparently there is a plugin for this). all of the scenes had complex, abstract imagery, and created a unique space to explore. some were also quite funny and cartoonish, especially with the sound effects. i probably would not have driven all the way to the city to attend this performance if i hadn't been playing as well, so i feel extra glad that i had the opportunity to catch it.

we drove back home to new haven the same night, and got back around 2am, but we still woke up at the same time as usual, which is probably a good thing for maintaining our sleep schedules. the day after a show, for me, is ideally a very lazy day. i did some cleaning and coding, and then we went to the thrift store and the eastern european grocery store. i got a bunch of clothes that i am OK with getting paint on for my new job. the thrift store did not have a dressing room (ugh) so i stood in a less popular section of the store and tried everything on over my clothes. which actually worked out fine because i like my clothing to be quite loose and comfy.

i'm writing this in the car as andrei drives us toward brooklyn and the venue where we are playing tonight. it's another hot day — normally i like that our apartment gets a lot of light, but today i drew all the blinds, partly so i could see my preview screen while practicing for the show, and partly because the direct sunlight was making our living room into a literal greenhouse. i may use some excess material i got for my car windows to make some insulating window coverings to use on days like this...

we did a bit more playing around with our gear this morning before packing it up, eating some lunch, and heading out. i'm looking forward to checking out a new venue, seeing some friends, and seeing MSHR's video performance. hopefully i can remember to take some photos.

it was quite hot today! i worked outside only briefly, but became covered in sweat regardless.

when i got back from work today, i discovered that my internet was down. because this journal is hosted on a raspberry pi in my house, it was still accessible inside my home network, but not from the outside world. in a way, it's kind of nice to have a website that goes down when my home internet is down, because it makes the web feel more personal. but usually my internet service is pretty reliable, so it will probably be pretty rare anyway. it's also cool that my ISP offers the option of a static IP address, which makes hosting things from home very easy.

now the internet is back up! i need to peel myself away from my book because i have some more preparation to do for tomorrow's show... also looking forward to sleeping in a bit tomorrow morning.